What Is A Business Engineer? The Rise Of Business Engineering

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What Is A Business Engineer? The Rise Of Business Engineering

A Business Engineer is a hybrid between a business administration and technology expert, a person with the business acumen and engineering abilities to understand a complex organization and devise solutions and work as a liaison between commercial and technical teams.

A glance at the Business Engineering world

At its core, a business engineer is a hybrid between a business person and an engineer. The business engineer is someone with the understanding of how the business world works ad macro level, combined with how organisms function at a micro level, that can architecture solutions based on several key elements.

As pointed out in Osterle, H. (1995), Business in the Information Age:

The business engineering concept enables the transformation of enterprises from the industrial age into the information age by means of procedure models, methods, and tools

Some of the key elements comprising business engineering require a deep understanding of several disciplines and areas:

Business model
Business processes
Organizational structure
Digitalization
Information process and technologies
The interaction between people and technologies within organizations

In one of its vacancies for Business Intelligence Engineer Amazon defines it as someone that can help “improve and define the best way of doing things throughout the company using the power of your analysis, technical skills, and business acumen.”

While this particular role is focused on improving internal processes to “identify opportunities to improve and optimize ship costs.”

As pointed out by Amazon “the successful candidate will be able to retrieve, integrate, visualize and present critical data in a format that is immediately useful to improve the business decision-making process.”

A discipline between business administration and technology

Business engineering is a discipline in between business administration and technology. As more and more organizations are innovated by combining technological product and processes with remixing old and new business model patterns, it becomes critical to understand and drive those processes.

A business engineer is a manager that can guide companies through hard decisions by looking at quantitative data, navigating ambiguity and reducing the noise where needed. Some of the disciplines part of business engineering are:

Management science
Business administration
Law and economics
Technology and engineering

A business engineer is a hybrid between a commercial and technical role. It can work as a liaison between commercial and technical teams to device complex solutions to its organizations or other companies for which the business engineer partners with.

What tasks a business engineer performs?

Some of the job descriptions from Indeed and LinkedIn say:

Developing sales and service with regional and global accounts, supporting Account Managers and business development. Driving sales-related activities, implementing customer projects such as product and prototype selections, costing, pricing, quotations, preparation for serial production, and logistics setups.

For instance, among the task required:

Interacting with customers and consulting with Account Managers providing technical and commercial support
Applying financial analysis to evaluate business opportunities
Coordinating and driving customer-related and internal projects and activities
Supporting and training the organization in technical, commercial and market-oriented tasks
Handling claims with internal partners and managing quality control

On a position for Business Intelligence Engineer Amazon points out:

Design, develop and maintain scaled, automated, user-friendly systems, reports, dashboards, etc. that will support business needs
Partner with operations/business teams to consult, develop and implement KPI’s, automated reporting/process solutions and data infrastructure improvements to meet business needs
Apply deep analytic and business intelligence skill to extract meaningful insight and learning from large and complicated data sets
Serve as liaison between the Business and technical teams to achieve the goal of providing actionable insights into current business performance, and ad hoc investigations into future improvements or innovations. This will require data gathering and manipulation, synthesis and modeling, problem-solving, and communication of insights and recommendations

What kind of background, education, and experience do you need to become a business engineer?

For some of the open vacancies for Business Engineer, the required background is:

Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical or Chemical Engineering or comparable technical field.
Preferably up to 3 years’ experience in technical sales and knowledge of heat transfer and thermodynamics
Advanced Microsoft Office with an understanding of calculation tools.
Experience of CRM/ERP systems is an advantage

Skills:

Enjoy working in an international environment
Proactive, positive, and target-oriented team player with a keen interest in technical and commercial matters
Very strongly customer-oriented
Strong networker with good interpersonal skills and the ability to cooperate and communicate with many different layers and cultures

Those, of course, are just some of the skills required. Those will widely vary from organization to organization.

How much does a business engineer make?

According to PayScale, the average yearly pay for a Business Engineer is $67,429. The total pay goes from $35,479 – $83,845 based on salary and bonus.

By running a search on Glassdoor for Business Engineer, the average salary can go from $64k per year for smaller organizations to senior Business Intelligence Engineer at eBay and Facebook, for $117k and $140k of yearly base salary respectively.

Do you want to become a business engineer? Start from the resources below: